Before the onslaught of out-sized holiday blockbusters, it's always quieter in the first half of the year. The first six months of 2011 has been privy to films that aren't usually the kind of fare that our cinema is associated with (and we’ll be back to overblown gaudiness soon enough). After last year's middling mid-year harvest, this year has been a revelation, with some truly worthy efforts, very often by first-time film-makers, who represent a new brat pack of upstarts and rule-changers. Here's a look at the very best of the lot.
To make a film about an event that most people in the audience would be familiar with and still evoke shock, outrage, empathy and helplessness is commendable. But then choosing a sensational case such as the Jessica Lall murder made Rajkumar Gupta's job that much easier. Having said that, the blatant subversion of justice abetted by tampering of evidence, buying/coercing witnesses into giving false testimonies and the sheer callousness of a political family to believe their son could get away with murder, is sickening enough to make your stomach churn any day of the year. Only, it happens all the time in this country -- and hence, the rare instance of a fair judgment and conviction, belated as it may have been, becomes a cause celebre.
Rajkumar Gupta’s well-made debut Aamir was somewhat tarnished by the exposure of its foreign source (Cavite). His second is as Indian—rather as Dilli—as India Gate.
That a film like No One Killed Jessica (taken from a newspaper headline) was made at all is a wonder. The sensational case has all but slipped from public memory, though the incident itself—of a politician’s son shooting a girl in cold blood and almost getting away with it—has been used in other films (Satta, Halla Bol) for its shock value. Then, it has two female protagonists, and Bollywood is notoriously wary of woman in the lead.
